Helicity decomposition of ghost-free massive gravity

By Claudia de Rham, G. Gabadadze, A. Tolley. 2011

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractWe perform a helicity decomposition in the full Lagrangian of the class of Massive Gravity theories previously proven to be free of the sixth (ghost) degree of freedom via a Hamiltonian analysis. We demonstrate, both with and without the use of nonlinear field redefinitions, that the scale at which the first interactions of the helicity-zero mode come in is $ {\Lambda_{{3}}} = {\left( {{M_{\text{Pl}}}{m^{{2}}}} \right)^{{{1}/{3}}}} $, and that this is the same scale at which helicity-zero perturbation theory breaks down. We show that the number of propagating helicity modes remains five in the full nonlinear theory with sources. We clarify recent misconceptions in the literature advocating the existence of either a ghost or a breakdown of perturbation theory at the significantly lower energy scales, $ {\Lambda_{{5}}} = {\left( {{M_{\text{Pl}}}{m^{{4}}}} \right)^{{{1}/{5}}}} $ or $ {\Lambda_{{4}}} = {\left( {{M_{\text{Pl}}}{m^{{3}}}} \right)^{{{1}/{4}}}} $, which arose because relevant terms in those calculations were overlooked. As an interesting byproduct of our analysis, we show that it is possible to derive the Stückelberg formalism from the helicity decomposition, without ever invoking diffeomorphism invariance, just from a simple requirement that the kinetic terms of the helicity-two, -one and -zero modes are diagonalized.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b30b1e2a84269bab673c7f7014f03bdaa0984e6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Interacting spin-2 fields (2012, unknown): “1) are ghost-free [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15].”
Theoretical Aspects of Massive Gravity (2011, background): “4) (20)The objections of [118] and [140] are addressed in [141] and [142] respectively.”
Exploring gravitational theories beyond Horndeski (2014, background): “Interestingly, a very similar argument has been invoked in the context of ghost-free massive gravity in [20].”
Massive Gravity (2014, background): “The fact that these quantities continue to correctly identify the physical degrees of freedom non-linearly in the limit MPl →∞ is non-trivial and has been derived in [143].”